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Dynamics 365 Community / Forums / Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived) / Relevance Search quest...
Microsoft Dynamics CRM (Archived)

Relevance Search questions

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Posted on by awalters 3,079

We're evaluating a possible move to D365 online (since on-prem is seemingly becoming less and less supported in a useful fashion) and we're not getting the results we would like or expect in a couple of ways.

1.  For the on-premise full-text search, we're using the Thesaurus in SQL to support things like getting results for Robert when you search Bob, and so on. I can see that Azure Search supports adding Synonym Maps, which would give us this same functionality, but when I go into my Azure portal I'm not seeing the Azure Search instance that D365 seems to be using.  Is there any way to access this to add these maps, add scoring profiles, etc...?

2.  There are a number of instances where the Quick Find and the Relevance Search are returning different results.  This was not the case on-prem with Full-Text on; it applied to both.  The main pattern I can find so far seems to be that Relevance Search doesn't work with leading wildcards - is this correct?  Is there any way to get this to work?

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  • awalters Profile Picture
    awalters 3,079 on at

    Been trying to edit this post for about 20 minutes, but it's not letting me.  Anyway, found a third point:

    3.  It looks like Quick Find automatically adds a trailing wildcard, while Relevance Search doesn't.  Ideally we'd like both to add it, but the second preference would be for it not to be added automatically to either.  The main priority would be to not have a different syntax for the two searches.  Anyone aware of any way to do either of these?

  • awalters Profile Picture
    awalters 3,079 on at

    If there's no way to change any of this behaviour, how do other people mitigate the fact that the two searches need different syntax to return the same results?  Especially for those who have moved from on-prem, where this is not the case?  The lack of support for the leading wildcard doesn't bug me too much, but the fact that the way the two searches work is internally inconsistent is definitely going to cause confusion.

  • Verified answer
    Adrian Begovich Profile Picture
    Adrian Begovich 1,027 Moderator on at

    Hi Allison Walters,

    You cannot modify the Relevance Search to be consistent with the Quick Find search as they are distinct search types. Relevance Search finds matches to any word in the search term in any field in the entity, where as Quick Find finds matches as in a SQL query with “Like” clauses. With the Quick Find search, you have to use the wildcard characters in the search term to search within a string, and all matches must be an exact match to the search term.

    You can find a comparison between Relevance Search, Full-text Quick Find, and Quick Find here.

  • awalters Profile Picture
    awalters 3,079 on at

    I understand the differences - that's what I drew from to create my original post.  But on our current implementation on-prem, with Full-text on, the search is the same in both places.  The users that have looked at our test Online instance have found these inconsistencies between the QF and RS searches to be very confusing.  I was really hoping that people had found some way to mitigate that confusion.

  • Suggested answer
    Adrian Begovich Profile Picture
    Adrian Begovich 1,027 Moderator on at

    Hi Allison Walters,

    Have you tried educating the users about the difference between the Relevance Search and the Quick Find search so that they avoid the confusion?

  • awalters Profile Picture
    awalters 3,079 on at

    Yes, of course.  They still found it difficult to remember what to do where, and incredibly non-intuitive.

  • Suggested answer
    Adrian Begovich Profile Picture
    Adrian Begovich 1,027 Moderator on at

    Hi Allison Walters,

    In that case, you may need to look at disabling Relevance Search and only using Quick Find Search.

  • awalters Profile Picture
    awalters 3,079 on at

    Unfortunately we need the capabilities of relevance search.  I understand that one might return more extensive results than the other - but the fact that you need to use different syntax to even get the same results is really confusing.  Especially when that hasn't been the case for us to this point.

    I was hoping to do something along this line - modifying the search itself:

    community.dynamics.com/.../quick-find-plugin-to-modify-the-search

    This looks like it might be a start.  I'll play with it, but still curious if anyone else has tried anything along these lines...

  • Verified answer
    awalters Profile Picture
    awalters 3,079 on at

    Unfortunately, it does look like there isn't currently a way to modify the relevance search in the slightest at this time.  I can use the above link to hook into the quick find search - but when I do a relevance search and trace it in the debugger, the context only shows a search on "owner", and nothing about my query terms I put in..  So it must be triggering something else in the background beyond the RetrieveMultiple request, that we can't (or I just have no clue on how to) hook into.

    I can't even figure out a way to do any modifications on the page itself, so we could do things like give a reminder when someone puts in a leading wildcard that it doesn't support that.

    There's a lot of power here, but it would be nice to have more control over it.  The AND and OR syntax is not necessarily what people are used to, and without being able to hook into the request we can't do things like change an "OR" to "|".  We're also really missing the thesaurus functionality from the on-prem full text search, and while AFAIK Azure Search uses Lucene, this implementation of it doesn't seem to support the Lucene fuzzy search syntax of ~.

    We did make the final decision to move to Online, but honestly this almost held us back and is definitely the biggest downside of the switch for us.

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